


The Evergreen Letters

by sigmalied



Series: Afterglow Universe [2]
Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Pining... among pines, Sexual Content, with a happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:13:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29807532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigmalied/pseuds/sigmalied
Summary: It’s May of 1988. A week in the High Sierra marks Dani and Jamie’s last major adventure before fully dedicating themselves to The Leafling. On the way east from San Francisco, Jamie picks up a field notebook on a whim. Evidently, she has something important to articulate about her companion. Through the dense evergreen spires and majestic granite cliffs springs a new river that shall carry and quench them through the rest of their lives. Jamie need only drink from it.(Or, how Jamie realises she’s in love.)
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Series: Afterglow Universe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2191038
Comments: 36
Kudos: 109





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! You may recognize me as the writer of [Afterglow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27200593/chapters/66440173). It’s important to state that this fic exists within that story’s continuity (specifically, between Chapters 2 and 3). Additionally, this story uses a custom skin for formatting purposes in future chapters. 
> 
> As per usual, I’m “up to something” again with this story. The most obvious “something” is that due to Jamie being this story’s perspective, I am experimentally writing with British vernacular and spelling conventions. If any Brits out there are irked by any unforgivable errors, I happily invite you to point them out to me. Again, it’s experimental — we’ll see how it goes. 
> 
> Thanks as always for reading. Find me on tumblr [@sigmalied](https://sigmalied.tumblr.com/) for fic extras and to hang out. :)

**Sunday, 15 May 1988**

❖

At the sound of her name penetrating a heavy daze of late-spring heat, Jamie throws a quick glance over her shoulder to locate its source. Bright sun glares upon a figure plodding along the paved footpath; red-faced, panting, and slouched beneath the gravity of exhaustion. Jamie decelerates her brisk jog to a standstill before altogether retreating. While closing the distance between herself and her ditched companion, Jamie offers a half-apologetic, half-teasing smirk. 

She could’ve sworn Dani was just two paces behind not ten seconds ago. Evidently, ten seconds made all the difference. 

“You good, Poppins?” Jamie asks her.

Dani’s slouch deepens when she grips her knees. “Yeah,” she answers, breathless, then adjusts the strap of her cotton singlet before it can slide further down her shoulder. “I just... need a minute.”

“Been chain smoking a bit too hard lately? Might want to think about cutting back.”

Her quip earns a deadpan leer. Dani certainly does _not_ smoke, but Jamie does, quite regularly. That, in combination with Dani’s irregular propensity for haste in her everyday gait, should’ve seen their comparative stamina reversed. Jamie supposes her toilsome years of landscaping Bly have given her a crucial edge, whereas Dani’s lifestyle has historically been one of relative leisure.

Regardless, they’re both aiming to achieve a similar level of endurance by next week. Jamie remains optimistic. They’re nearly there. Today they’ve failed their park circuit by only a few minutes — a negligible deficit in the grand scheme of things. Wilderness trails are meant to be savoured, not raced through, and physical fitness of the cardiovascular variety shall only assist and elevate the experience. 

The High Sierra awaits them as their final adventure abroad before an era of permanence necessitated by business ownership. They’ve planned this trip over months, ever since a journey up the western coastline excluded inland ranges of natural wonder from their route. Their resolve to return predated The Leafling’s inception by an entire month. Antecedence preserved its priority, as did some unspoken, borderline mysticism about a fugitive yet spectacular beauty carved by an ancient glacier of artistic inclination. 

They _have_ to see it. They’re drawn to it like insects to a flame, made diminutive and ignorant under the glow of something as incalculably alluring and elusive as fire itself. 

The pair take turns sipping from a concrete drinking fountain. Jamie lifts the hem of her shirt to dab at the sweat on her brow and watches Dani release her hair to retie it. She’s still rosy in her cheeks and upper chest. Her skin delicately shines, illuminating her in soft mid-morning candour. When Jamie is reminded of a similar dishevelment that occurs between bedsheets, her stare indulgently lingers. 

Dani notices. She draws her loose hair back, smiles around the scrunchie held between her teeth, and asks, “What?” as soon as her mouth is free to speak. 

“Nothing,” Jamie replies with an evasive shake of her head and shrug. She adds a pleasant confession, “You look nice.”

A raised brow illustrates Dani’s perfect blend of disbelief and suspicion. While stepping past, she brushes her fingertips along the curve of Jamie’s waistline. The gesture itself is subtle, but its message isn’t. 

The scar of affection Dani leaves there burns for hours. It maintains not a blaze, nor an errant flicker, but a low and steady hearth; like glowing coals, or sun-baked stone. 

❖

After stopping at the flat for a shower and a wardrobe change, they disembark again to a sporting goods store. 

Well-stocked shelves climb toward the ceiling with abundant mountains of outdoor gear, clothing, and sports equipment. The pungent scents of new plastics and rubber waft through every aisle, threatening a headache. Jamie ventures down the canyon of footwear with Dani in tow, passing trainers and cleats on their way to hiking boots. 

Dani peels back the aluminium foil and wax paper covering a roll of hard boiled sweets and slips between her lips a little green ring she’s exposed. She holds out the roll to Jamie to offer the next in procession: a red one that sits on her tongue like cherries. 

While they examine shoes on display and search for equivalents in their sizes, Jamie idly tumbles the sweet about her mouth. She rotates a boot in one hand to inspect the leather body and rugged texture of its sole. From the provided seating near the end of the aisle, Dani tries one on. They’re tan with red laces and fit her perfectly. 

“They’ve got decent tread, right?” Jamie asks her. “Won’t be sliding off any cliffs in a hurry?”

To answer the question, Dani fits her hand in her spare boot like a glove and lifts it to present a well-defined topography. “You know,” she says, “I _have_ gone camping before. Well, in a trailer, so we didn’t actually sleep outside, but that’s beside the point. I’m more savvy than you think.”

“Yeah? You get up to any mountains?”

“Uh, no. Iowa’s pretty flat. We went to a lake.”

Jamie clicks her tongue in lighthearted teasing. “I don’t know... When we’re scaling those treacherous switchbacks, and the bighorns are our only company a kilometre above the valley—”

“We’re not actually going that high up, are we?”

She smiles. “Not if you aren’t up to it.”

“And you _are?_ ” Playful doubt carries Dani’s tone as she squeezes her foot back into her shoe without untying its laces.

Maybe so, maybe not. Jamie spent most of her life crammed into dense grey towns and cities. Bly was the first time she resided in a landscape whose foundational colour was green, but its rurality could hardly be classified as wilderness. Placid fields, meadows, and thickets enveloped the beaten path of civilisation, and Jamie never so much as gardened on any inclines steeper than twenty degrees. 

A mountaineer, she is not. However, Jamie _does_ count herself as something of a survivalist. As a young adult she frequently camped in abandoned buildings, foraged meals in unlikely or risky places, and adapted to changing climates of personal well-being as one would adapt to hazardous rain or sleet on a trail. Through tribulations of bygone days, Jamie developed a rather universal aptitude for _not perishing_ in crises. 

Her personal wisdom concerns the architecture of humanity; their jungles of steel and brick, where intent can be gleaned from the height of fences and the flow of roads. Her wisdom is derived from, and in servitude to, order. 

_Order._ Vanquisher of chaos. Administer of purpose. Her saviour. Jamie’s profession as a gardener is an homage to order. She conscripts overgrowth into her standards of grace, conquers it to do her bidding, and flexes power of life and death over every organism within her domain. 

But what happens when the landscape’s keeper is itself? Self-defined, self-created, amorphous through time yet seemingly eternal? That which witnessed itself come into existence? Heedless while demanding heed? Beauty formed by formless beauty? Jamie has always harboured reverential awe — and fear — of nature’s inscrutable, capricious will; provident and violent in the same stroke.

There’s a supposition circling overhead like a vulture aching to see whether its quarry lives or dies: perhaps, if Jamie is able to walk alongside nature, and not against it, some old invisible wound will seal up inside her and she’ll feel whole enough to—

She doesn’t know what, exactly. _Hold water again_ is her first reflex of phrase. 

After they finish shopping, Dani leads a browsing cruise down various aisles. Beneath an arch of fishing poles erected in display, she sifts through dazzling lures pegged to the shelves while Jamie inspects tackle boxes. When Dani holds an iridescent lure shaped like a minnow to her earlobe, pretending it’s jewellery, Jamie laughs. 

In the checkout queue, Dani passes Jamie another sweet. This one is yellow and tart with the suggestion of lemon. 

Like before, the joy is a simple but significant one; warm and considerate and homely in a way Jamie didn’t realise she was starved of until Dani introduced her to its taste. Dani’s companionship is a broth of fond feeling, a sustenance not for the stomach, but for the soul.

Fate produces another green ring for Dani, who readily fits it between her lips without a shadow of dismay. Jamie hears it click against Dani’s teeth when she speaks, “I called my mom earlier, to let her know where I’m living now. And to give her a permanent phone number.”

Jamie prods at chocolate bars arranged in an impulse display, finding the term _permanent_ undeniably cosy. 

“I told her about you.”

At that particular disclosure, Jamie’s eyebrows raise and her gaze meets Dani’s, seeking elaboration. “About me? For real?” She spares the people queuing behind them a momentary glance — two young parents about to purchase a baseball glove for their excited son of primary school age.

“You know,” says Dani. “How you’re my... roommate.”

Jamie can’t determine whether that word is coded or not. Dani’s expression remains mildly affable, and consequently opaque. 

“Verbatim?” Jamie hazards, holding a peanut-heavy bar between the fingertips of opposing hands. 

A nod clarifies Dani’s meaning, leaving Jamie adrift between relief and disappointment. Exposure would’ve been mortifying, certainly. Yet secrecy as a shelter doesn’t feel like a proper dwelling. It’s more akin to a bunker — a necessity for survival — in which she and Dani decorate its sturdy cold walls with civilian comforts while hostilities scream outside. 

_Girlfriend_.

Jamie silently plies the word around the interior of her mouth along with the lemon sweet, pondering their entwined flavour. It’s so new, so disarmingly tepid and indulgent like summer leisure. She watches Dani draw her wallet and mentally superimposes the term _girlfriend_ over the pretty sight of her, as if to dress her in its kindly gown. But Dani outshines it, makes its fabric dim and dull in comparison. There is no single word in existence with enough glamour to suitably clothe Dani. Nothing less than novels and treatises could dare envelop all she is and what they have. 

For them, _girlfriend_ as a classification is barely two days old and they’ve already outgrown it. But where do they grow to? Where does the climbing ivy go after it has consumed the wall? Jamie cannot say. She has always clipped ivy back before it could swim in the sky. 

❖

That evening they rehearse their luggage at home, cluttering their bed’s olive green duvet to its four corners with diverse inventory. In orderly array lies several days’ worth of clothing plus provisional articles, weather-resistant jackets, a torch, a pair of enamel mugs embellished with rose designs, a dome tent rolled into a nylon sleeve with its poles for one night’s planned stint outdoors, among other tools and utilities. 

While Dani runs the tip of a highlighter along a map, tracing motorways eastward from San Francisco, Jamie flicks out the blade of a folding knife and catches the lamp’s gleam in its steel. 

“This all right to bring along?” she asks Dani, who looks up and replies, “It should be fine. We’ll put it in the carry-on.”

Jamie tucks away the blade and tosses the knife into the mix, then loads a compact camera with a fresh roll of film. “Made a sign for the shop,” she says. “Closed for renovations.”

“Renovations?” Dani echoes. 

“Makes it sound like we’re still around,” explains Jamie. She fits the camera into a leather case and buttons it shut. “Trust me, any business advertising an unattended holiday might as well be saying: help yourself.”

“Personal experience?”

She nods. “Personal experience.”

Jamie locates the spiral-bound notepad containing their grocery list, where two distinct penmanships clamour to be helpful. It reads, in its current state:

  * Pasta (macaroni or tagliatelle) ← ~~i don’t know what that is~~. It’s the flat ones  

  * pepperoni or dry salami  

  * dried fruit / nuts / granola ??  

  * Oatmeal & Cereal  

  * 4 Oranges
  * 2 Apples
  * Peanut Butter  
 ~~~~
  * ~~Instant coffee & teabags~~ (steal from hotel)  

  * Hard cheese (Gouda, Parmesan, and/or Asiago) “Asiago” what is that. Dani please  

  * Crackers   

  * chocolates (for morale)
  * Milk (1 qt)
  * LOTS of water



It’s a reasonable start. Over the next week they’ll further amend it as they more stringently consider the capacity of their plastic ice chest and opportunities to resupply or buy meals in the valley itself. 

Dani reviews their tentative schedule. On the twenty-first of May they’ll fly into San Francisco, hire a car, acquire their groceries and other essentials they can’t fly with, then stay overnight at a hotel. The following morning, they’ll head out, stop in Merced for breakfast and a last chance at obtaining anything they might’ve missed in San Francisco, then enter the valley. And the next five days shall be subservient to their wanderlust. 

There’s nothing particularly novel about the logistics of the trip. They’ve planned longer and more complex excursions before. Back in the early days, when the threat of Dani dying seemed so real and imminent, they explored New England in search of its worthiest experiences as an unspoken parting gift. Compared to that scramble, this is rudimentary. There’s no confounding sense of urgency, no despair latent in every affection or sentiment shared between them.

Because Dani remains vibrantly alive, exhibiting no signs of perishing anytime soon. While circumstances may change one day, that day is not here. At present, they are happy, they are dating, and they are settling into a state of committed permanence. 

That word, again, soothes Jamie. As she absently twists the knobs of her bureau drawer, she feels inordinately still in body and mind. She’s a windless, cloudless day over an inanimate grassland. Peaceful, yet... waiting, for another frisson of weather to mark the passage of time and change; that bittersweet substance that grows the living through hurt and healing. 

“Jamie? You doing all right? You’ve been kinda quiet today.”

Dani’s voice wakes her. “Hm?” Jamie vocalises. “Yeah. Just, you know. Thinking about the trip.”

She folds the annotated map and stores it along with their luggage. “Good or bad thoughts?”

“Good,” Jamie decisively responds with an affirming nod. “Last one for a while, right? We’ll make the most of it.”

“Last one for a while,” repeats Dani, rising from her perch on the bed to approach Jamie. “But our _first_ one—” She takes Jamie’s hands to squeeze them, smiling sweetly enough to encourage Jamie to wear one in reciprocation. “—as a _couple_. Officially. Took you long enough.” 

Jamie rolls her eyes as Dani’s hands raise to hold her face. “Took _you_ long enough. That’s how this works. Lack of initiative is a collaborative crime.”

“Oh, Jamie.” Dani softly teases. “I just wanted to be sure you were ready. I want to be so careful with you. I know how sensitive you are—”

She scoffs. “I am not.”

“You _are_ ,” Dani insists. “You always feel and say so much.” She curls her fingers into the back of Jamie’s collar and reels her in for a kiss.

As soon as they part, Dani initiates another by sealing a caress around Jamie’s bottom lip. She is pure unfiltered certitude. This is the complexion of Dani’s intimacy. Full-tide, unrestrained, and shining bright enough to blind. She is hazy yellow sunrise, fusing all touched land into gulfs of light. She’s soft and warm and Jamie collides with her like night dissolving into dawn. 

Jamie is more than receptive when, true to form, Dani seeks her tongue. She can’t fathom how Dani always makes such a brazen request seem infinitely delicate and tender as impetus for company, never invasion. So Jamie folds her arms about Dani’s shoulders, weaves her fingers into golden blonde, and opens herself to her. Perhaps if Dani tastes her deeply enough, she’ll illuminate the longing in her flesh and name it succinctly where Jamie has failed.

 _You taste like suppressed devotion_ , is among what Dani wouldn’t say. _You taste like the desperate cusp of contentment. You taste like an unresolved wound._

These are truths, but Jamie broods so close to the issue’s core she cannot descry its totality. She’s describing emerald stalks of tall wild grass when she should be describing a meadow. She’s describing individual grains of shell-laden sand when she should be describing a beach. 

If she were brave enough to step back, she’d see it in one word, one everlasting promise, that would adhere all the preserved fragments of her heart into a basin worthy of... _holding water_ , she thinks. 

**Saturday, 21 May 1988**

❖

It’s nearly one in the morning when Jamie quietly rises from bed. She’s supposed to be resting for tomorrow’s flight, but an errand has been haunting her for days. Jamie suspects she won’t achieve peace of mind on holiday knowing she’d left without seeing to it. 

On the balcony, where her makeshift garden sleeps in wait for tomorrow’s sun, Jamie opens a satchel of seeds. They’re dingy amber in colour and unattractively oblong, like swollen corn kernels. She takes her folding knife to three of them, carving little notches in their tough hides until slivers of white vulnerable flesh peek out to reflect moonlight beaming in over Jamie’s shoulder. After stratifying them, Jamie leaves them to soak overnight in a shallow dish of water. In the morning, she’ll plant them in potting mix and peat. 

For minutes she stands watching over the little seeds glistening at the bottom of the dish, dreaming of the chance at life she’s given them and hoping they’ll survive long enough to cherish it. Under her constant care, there would be no question. But Jamie will be stepping away for days, leaving these infant motes to the mercy of weather and possible avian predation. Jamie knows she will either return to seedlings, vacant pits, or extinguishment via unforeseen elements. Nature shall take its course for better or worse. It giveth and taketh away, observing no pity, for nature knows not what that is. 

She’d like to keep them safe. She’d like to establish her garden as a return to Eden’s glory, where death does not exist, and people cannot bleed. But she won’t. She can’t. There are some things — inevitabilities, woes, injustices — that lie outside her control. 

_I may lose you_ , she thinks. _No. I_ will _lose you. If not next week, then in months. The more I care now, the more it’ll hurt when it happens. And I have to be okay with that. Can I be okay with that?_

Of course, her thoughts address more than her seeds. 

By some twisting of related cognition, Jamie remembers her parents, who might’ve once genuinely adored each other before utter destruction. They saw their ship sinking and did nothing to save it. On the contrary, Louise spitefully blew new holes into the hull while Dennis sat in its flooding belly, waiting to drown. Jamie was born on that ship and lived her whole life itinerant on similar ones condemned to watery graves. 

_You hop to the next before yours goes under,_ she’d learned quite early on. _You survive at all costs._

But she doesn’t want to think of her current life as just another doomed vessel. She wants to maintain this one, fixing it as they go, polishing their lustre the moment it starts to tarnish. She doesn’t want to wander anymore like some wretched gull trapped between ocean and sky. She wants safe harbour. She wants to roost and build wonderful places for herself and Dani to live in. She wants to fill the ground with roots and clutch fast at the earth, anchoring them against land that forever surges with the memory of wrathful seas. 

Jamie obliges herself to a secret contingency: what flourishes now shall flourish forever.

She returns to bed as gingerly as possible. Dani stirs at the slight disturbance, but not to the point of waking. Nevertheless, she wakes herself moments later by unconsciously brushing her shins against Jamie’s feet and catching their chill. 

Following a tiny gasp, Dani utters, “ _Jamie_. Why are you so cold?”

“Sorry,” she whispers. “Was just checking on the plants outside. Had some things I forgot to set up.”

“Put socks on.”

“Okay.”

“I’m kidding,” Dani clarifies. “Come here.” She draws Jamie into an embrace. After tucking her chin over Jamie’s shoulder, Dani slides one of her legs between hers. 

Jamie’s instinct is to jump in surprise at the sudden forward intimacy, but she suppresses the urge upon gleaning chaste intent. Dani’s leg is deliciously warm between hers. She hugs its generous gift with her thighs, stealing heat with a modicum of associated guilt. In recompense, she rubs Dani’s back through her nightshirt, replacing what she’s taken. 

“I could’ve just put socks on,” says Jamie. “You know I always do what you tell me to.”

She can feel Dani smiling into her shoulder. “You’d better,” Dani jokes. “But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to hold you.”

“You don’t need one.”

When Jamie turns to fondly kiss her cheek, she inhales the floral scent of Dani’s shampoo and prays they’ll always be this sweet and doting, alchemising inconvenience into opportunities to care for one another. 

Once they settle, and Jamie is as warm as their bed, she gazes at slats of pale light bleeding in from the window. The marble face of the moon peeks in through the blinds and speaks to her, as reality slurs at the edge of a dream: _I would not be seen without the sun to love me._


	2. Chapter 2

**Sunday, 22 May 1988**

❖

A vast quilt of agriculture surges across California’s heartland in a verdant sash. They’ve been traversing patchwork walnut, almond, and grape country since dawn in a hardy little rental. Merced lies in the southeast, a concrete island amid a beige wash stippled by organised green. 

This ilk of rurality once comprised half of the dichotomous American experience Jamie once presumed to be true: either loud and luminous cities of wealth and opportunity, or infinite rolling fields of solitude and simplicity. 

Upon their initial meeting, Jamie had associated Dani with the latter environment, if only to uphold a preconceived stereotype. Dani rolled into the manor like midwestern complacency and insularity; a middle-class princess of corn, or rawhide, or strawberry gingham and apple pie at small-town barbecues. Like in the movies. When she first heard Dani speak, Jamie paused to stare and listen in disbelief at a hint of a nasal drawl, an incidental lisp, and final g’s of gerunds gone unenunciated. She was tempted to laugh. 

It was an absurd reaction, in retrospect. These days, Jamie would beat to a bloody pulp anyone who’d dare ridicule Dani’s accent. Because when Dani speaks, sun rises over Jamie’s world. To disparage her speech is to disparage the bells of daybreak, and Jamie spares no mercy for those who would deny hope and kindness its voice. Indeed, daybreak has its surly champion whether she knows it or not.

Jamie glances over at Dani asleep in the passenger seat, postured at a slant with lips parted to admit silent breaths, and weathering every meagre jolt of the car’s suspension over inconsistent roads. Early morning floods over her, illuminating dainty hoop earrings and a white t-shirt with its sleeves turned up to expose skin rarely kissed by sunlight. 

Even now, Dani’s company is sweet comfort. The prismatic memory of yesterday colours their trustful silence. A five-hour flight made bearable through a shared blanket and a shared book read within a dewy cloud of Dani’s perfume, her hand clasped warmly in hers. Grocery shopping at dusk, where Dani had discovered among produce crates two oranges of delightful mass and fragrance. While heading out into the car park, Jamie discreetly slipped a loose carnation of identical hue into the breast pocket of Dani’s shirt and relished her beam and blush, too distracted to realise Jamie hadn’t precisely paid for it. 

On that same errand, Dani bought an avocado to split over their cod and chips takeaway. Jamie had never tried one before. She watched Dani carve an equator into its leathery hide to halve it around a smooth pit. The flesh was buttery, soft yet dense on the palate, and vaguely earthy. After elevating their supper with fresh lemon wedges and a side of slaw, Jamie could not recall the last time she ate American bastardisations of familiar dishes and didn’t yearn for elements of home. 

Night came, falling upon steep bayside roads snaking through eclectic architecture and pastels made lurid under stark moonlight. They shut themselves into their hotel room where Jamie savoured Dani’s weight in her lap and her legs folded covetously about her hips. She sent hands smoothing up the back of her shirt to clutch her closer. She buried herself in the solace of Dani, in her clothes and heated flesh and the lush scent of her, in steady box spring creaks, in her voice fraught with pleasure. 

Jamie wakes Dani when Merced’s modest skyline peeks over the horizon; an architectural potpourri of mid-century stone facades and flour-white colonial arches. They stop at a diner for breakfast and stretch a paper map over the table after pushing their empty plates aside. A travel brochure and a pocket-sized hiking guide join the spread. 

Lowering a cigarette from her lips, Jamie comments, “So, we’ve got about two more hours ahead of us. Looks like a pretty straight shot if we keep on 140. Until the mountains, of course. Gonna be a bit of winding there. You don’t get car sick, right?”

“No,” Dani answers, a bit too swiftly. She adds, while partially obscuring her mouth with a cup of coffee, “Sometimes.”

“Well, let me know if you start feeling... queasy. I’m sure they’ll be passing places along the way. Could take in some scenery while we’re at it. There’s the silver lining, I suppose.”

“Can I drive?”

Jamie taps her cigarette over an ashtray. “That helps?”

“Kinda. Like, when you’re steering and anticipating the turns, it’s not so bad.”

Convinced, Jamie shrugs and says, “All right. Reckon I’ll be glad for the break from driving. This state is fucking huge. It just doesn’t end.”

Dani checks her watch and opens the hiking guide to one of several marked pages. “If we leave now we should get there around eleven. Wanna do a hike after we check into the room? Let’s see Bridalveil. It’s a short one.”

She peers over the table at the page Dani has opened to. The monochrome image printed alongside the text depicts a gauzy waterfall plunging over a cliff. It diffuses into plumes of fine white mist that occlude a brisk stream bulging with boulders. 

Jamie replies in perfect amenability, “Anywhere you want to go, we go.”

Her comment has Dani rolling her eyes and conceding to the smile tugging at her lips. She tucks a hand beneath her chin and gazes at Jamie, silently communicating a wealth of appreciation. Jamie would hike with Dani to the ragged edge of the world, if only to bask in that look a moment longer. 

Before returning to the road, the pair stroll two buildings down and duck into a convenience store shamelessly capitalising on its proximity to Yosemite. In addition to typical wares, it supplies outdoor instruments, sundries, and souvenirs. Jamie treks between colourful shelves vying for her custom and plucks two disposable lighters from a stand near checkout. Meanwhile, Dani meanders away to examine a rack of rustic wooden keychains.

When they briefly rendezvous, Dani shows Jamie a keychain fashioned from a cross-sectioned pine branch. A circumference of rough bark encloses an image of a flower etched by fire across faint age rings. Dogwood, Jamie immediately recognises. 

Dani announces, “I’m buying this for you,” and Jamie, ever serene at Dani’s whims of generosity and consideration, resolves to attach it to a little metal hook on the strap of her rucksack. 

Quite averse to running out of hot water for tea and meals, Jamie seeks spare fuel for their compact canister stove. On her way to the appropriate shelf, she glances back at Dani, whose wheat-golden mane of waves and logo-streaked white shirt tucked into the high waist of mid-wash jeans, stands entirely radiant against the store’s drab earthen tones. There’s something agonisingly liminal about the sight of her. She’s a river of constant churning froth. Ungraspable, neither here nor there, gone upon arrival. 

Inexplicable clamminess engulfs Jamie’s hands. She feels poised on the precipice of a monumental undertaking or statement, and made terribly nervous from it. The sensation is a stabbing — sudden and brutal. It leaves behind a gored ache in her heart as an inner assailant vanishes into darkness, refusing to be identified.

Jamie retreats from the camping wares with a four-ounce canister. Along her brief search for Dani, she pauses at a section of wall devoted to stationary. There’s postcards, novelty pens, and journals. One item catches and holds her notice: a small field notebook. Its cover is rich juniper green, emblazoned by a lone pine silhouette several shades darker.

She takes it with her. 

❖

They parallel a railroad upon diving back into the agricultural sprawl. The highway is a bullet’s path east for nine miles until it glances the peripheral community of Planada, bends northeast, and peels away from the rails. Soon they’re climbing chaparral hills, navigating roads hewn directly into earth where vegetation adamantly sprouts sideways from bare dirt faces. Stalks and stems crane for the sun. 

Jamie casually grips the handle above the passenger side window as she peers out at the evolving scenery. The day is so bright, the land’s vagaries of trees, rocks, and distant summits seem bleak in high constant against the sky’s empty blue bowl. Shadows are thick stamps of ink, bled from life flattened onto the film of perception. Every leaf wears a sallow face. 

Beside her, Dani drives. Once her contemplative daze dissolves, Jamie pulls her attention inward. Through light blotches staining her vision, she observes Dani’s docile concentration. As Dani delivers them through a relentless purgatory of bends, her knuckles are pale, not white, on the steering wheel. Bare forearms graze denim-clad thighs when her hands slide to the wheel’s base, achieving ease and confidence.

Jamie feels safe. 

For someone so inured to fending for herself, relinquishing charge to Dani remains a confounding experience, but not an unpleasant one. Being cared for and looked after in any capacity is a gift Jamie once thought too generous to accept. 

There are times when Dani kisses Jamie with such assurance that all sense of place and equilibrium abandons her. There are times when Dani feeds them and Jamie is astounded at how her assumption of this duty is borne from genuine tenderness, not obligation. There are times when Dani beds her sweetly and thoroughly, showing Jamie what it feels to be a riverbed washed to satin, blissful compliance. There are times when Jamie awakes tucked within the protective curl of Dani’s arm and knows no fear of anything. 

Jamie rolls down the window a crack and slips her fingers through the space, feeling the air gain humidity as they approach the Merced River. She asks Dani, in a moment of curiosity, “When you were a teacher, did you ever go on school trips with your students?”

“I did,” Dani replies with a frank raise of her brow. “Although, they were nothing too special. There were farms, and a couple museums. This is gonna sound really silly, but I think I liked the farms better. Just being outside in the sun, looking out at all the huge fields. And constant paranoia that one of the kids might run off somewhere. Boring, right?”

“Sounds nice, actually,” Jamie says. “I like boring. Boring’s peaceful. I never went on any school trips as a kid. I was too badly behaved. See, I wasn’t always the darling sweetheart I am now.”

The bridge of Dani’s nose scrunches when she laughs. “What’d you do? Darling sweetheart?”

An amused blush streaks Jamie’s cheeks. “Oh, you know,” she says. “I’d get into fights, nick things from other kids. Insolence. Pretty standard fare. I bet _you_ never got in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Dani admits. “For the most part, I followed the rules and did what I was supposed to. Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

Jamie notices wistfulness in Dani’s features. As she understands, Dani’s upbringing was plagued by isolation. With no siblings or reliable parents to guide her, Dani was driven toward surrogates: Eddie O’Mara and his family. Dani’s relationship with the O’Mara clan was — and remains — a complicated one. They saved her. But their expectations also condemned her to a paradigm of conventionality that nearly destroyed her. It certainly ended up destroying _someone_ , through a rather gruesome accident that Jamie knows to never broach unless by Dani’s own initiation.

Sometimes, Jamie feels like they lived different versions of the same childhood, separated by a sea and the nuance of circumstance. The greatest evidence for this supposition is their shared dialect; one that transcends regionality. It is a language of yearning, hurt, and cautious hope. Whenever one speaks, the other understands with native fluency.

The presence of conifers explodes along a steady altitude gain. Soon, majestic spires of pine are the only green Jamie sees. Palisades of needled glory chaperone them to the boundaries of the national park, where fellow motorists queue at a checkpoint. There they obtain a map and pass into protected land. 

Not ten minutes later, the coniferous wall abruptly disintegrates into fields of withered, ashen corpses of trees. They stand in silence under parched sunlight like spent matchsticks, broken or brittle, each one its own solemn headstone. 

Dani asks, “How long ago do you think there was a fire here?”

“From what I’ve read, this state’s always on fire,” Jamie dryly remarks. She nonetheless peers out the window to assess the ground. Green carpets the desolation, clambering up dead wood in new shrubs and saplings. “A couple years, maybe,” she estimates. “It’s natural, though. Some things need fire to grow. Those redwoods a bit south? They germinate more after fires kill off the competition.”

“Sounds cutthroat.”

She pensively nods in agreement. Beautiful and brutal, the policy of life. 

The forest heals as they venture further. There’s a moment, as they round an inconspicuous bend, where Jamie recognises a formation among hazy mountains and says, “Oi! Look. There it is.”

Dani spares a glance. “Oh, wow. It’s _beautiful_.”

Embedded into the horizon is a tremendous stone mass, glacier-polished smooth and grey until a sheer vertical cut truncates its dome. Within seconds it’s obscured by closer ranges, but another chance to view its grandeur lies shortly ahead. 

The road plunges them into a tunnel. Over a full minute, Jamie listens to the roaring echo of vehicles traversing the passage. Sodium orange safety lights flicker overhead in rapid succession, mounted directly into bedrock. The mysterious cocktail of strange lights and strange sounds contribute a certain exhilaration to the transitory space as it conducts travellers from one realm to the next. Faith is its only toll; faith that what lies beyond the threshold of this earthen capillary shall be superior to what lies behind. 

Through intermittent flashes of eerie orange and darkness, Jamie looks over at Dani to find a diminutive smile on her lips. She’s suddenly afflicted by a preternatural fear at the idea of touching her, as though Dani’s substantiality might dissipate beneath the weight of her hand. Despite her irrational trepidation, Jamie brushes against her thigh to announce her presence. Dani readily welcomes Jamie by folding a spare hand into hers, asserting her incontrovertible presence until they’re thrust back into daylight. 

Following the tunnel’s exit is a car park situated before a magnificent viewpoint. They stop to view its splendour and stretch their legs among other tourists. Jamie unzips her rucksack, retrieves the camera, and brings it along.

The vista is ineffably glorious. From an interminable floor of dense forest rises an amphitheatre of granite, arranged in such spontaneous permanence and stern tranquility it composes a painting unto itself. On the left juts the powerful and unapologetic monolith of El Capitan, whose raw, precipitous face looms over the valley like a vanguard. To the right cascades Bridalveil, spilling from a natural shelf its diaphanous tulle, spun by pearly snowmelt. And humbly framed in the centre of the composition, at a greater distance, hunches Half Dome in iconic, persevering grace. Marred severely by nature yet wholly defiant of its punishment, the crest sits in stately repose, more worldly than the world. 

Standing at the stone barrier, Jamie stares in awe. She almost disregards Dani when she slides the camera case’s strap from Jamie’s shoulder, taking custody of it, and bids her, “Look over here. And smile, okay?”

“Oh, uh, I dunno—“

“Please? I need something nice to put in my wallet.”

Jamie acquiesces to the gentle behest. There she stands sheepishly smiling in her work jeans, new hiking boots, and a rumpled band t-shirt with sun cream delicately shining on her face and arms, waiting for Dani to assimilate her, undeservingly, into the canvas of proportionless beauty.

❖

Their single-bed lodge room is contained within an unassuming brown complex in the valley, conveniently central and in proximity to a shuttle stop. After unloading their luggage, they split a massive orange and a preassembled sandwich bought in San Francisco, kept chilled overnight. 

The four-hour drive has exhausted them. Dani collapses onto the bed and tells Jamie, “Just gonna close my eyes. Can you wake me in twenty minutes, and we’ll go?”

Jamie finds an alarm clock on the nightstand, sets it as directed, and joins her. She rests beside Dani, draping an arm over her waist. Dani settles into her company and dozes. 

They’re so far from home. An entire country stands between them and their tiny Vermont flat — Dani’s gracious gift of constancy. Of course Jamie pays her share, but Dani’s name is on the lease, and Jamie is the one who originally asked for it. And simply knowing it waits for them, housing their soft and familiar bed and their clothes and their balcony garden, is a comfort that soothes Jamie’s very soul.

She blearily stares at the curtains drawn over the window. Through peach-dyed cotton the sun seeps, setting the room warmly aglow. The moment is palpable and heady, but reproachfully finite. Seconds slip by, fragile as gloam, spontaneously creating ghosts that emulsify the air with happiness and melancholy. 

The quiet has become unbearable. It’s pursued Jamie for weeks, rendering the world a vast portrait of still life. It’s a bowl of acrylic fruit, beautiful and inedible. It’s an immense salted sea, none for drinking. This quiet, this stillness, is not one that begs reverence. Rather, it is a hunger. A slow starvation, a mouth wired shut. 

On a whim, Jamie rises. She unzips a pocket in her rucksack to retrieve her little green notebook and a pen. It’s the first time she’s resorted to such measures since prison, where her psychiatrist would hand her an exercise book and invite her to express her thoughts at the beginning of each session. Anything on her mind, Tamara had said. Then she would permit Jamie to shred her entries, if she desired. But Jamie never did. It was like obliterating pieces of herself. 

Jamie sits in a chair near the window and peels back the notebook’s cover. She sees Dani, lying prone on the bed with one hand curled beneath her chest, and the other splayed over the spot Jamie recently inhabited. Sleep holds her under its light, feathery influence, softening her features. Dani has been sporadically napping all day, Jamie notes, possibly in recuperation of the hours they deferred to pleasure last night. 

Ink rolls over blank lines as Jamie scrawls:

22/5/1988

I look at you. The white tips of your fingernails, every hair in each brow, lips that think me worth kissing. You breathe, and I breathe, and we’re here. You’re here, with me. And still I want you. I have you, yet I want you.

I can’t cook. I can’t dance. I have baggage. I have a temper. I’m not good at finances. Sometimes I have to write things down or I forget them. I’m afraid of more things than I’m comfortable admitting, because I just want to be enough for you. 

A little while ago, you peeled that orange you could barely hold in one hand. I smelled the fragrant rind and watched juice bead in your palm when you slipped and stabbed your thumb into it. There was half for me, half for you, but each half was as good as a whole. It was so tart and sweet my eyes watered at the first bite, and I forgot that I was ever ugly at all. 

That big orange orb — like carving up and dining on sunset.

Before the alarm can sound, Jamie switches it off and wakes Dani in its stead by running gentle fingertips into her hairline, thumb brushing the coral shell of her ear. Dani stirs, mumbles, “Five more minutes?” and turns to kiss Jamie’s wrist. 

Jamie nods and promises, “Five more minutes.” 

❖

The trail to Bridalveil, as it turns out, poses virtually no challenge. A paved incline winds through half a mile of pine bordering a creek fed by the falls. Its scenic approachability immerses them in the company of many other hikers. With their rucksacks reconfigured to the needs of lightweight travel, their pace is brisk and unimpeded.

The air holds a fresh, delectable spice. Birds chirp among the trees, unseen. Jamie pauses occasionally to examine the wildflowers; little bushels of milkweed sprouting between lichen-smudged stones, and shy mountain violets dotting the creek’s borders like buttery stars. They compose rare sights. Most visible ground is a suffocated bed of dry pine needles.

Over the creek’s simmer, Dani shares, “One time, when I was six, my dad taught me how to start a fire without matches. He was a boy scout. Allegedly.”

“When you were six years old?” Jamie snorts. “How’d that go?”

“About as well as you’d expect. We burnt part of the backyard lawn. Luckily my mom never noticed.”

“Is that what he was like? Was he fun?” 

They dodge a family stopped for a photo by veering off the pavement. Needles and twigs snap beneath Jamie’s boots, stoking her ache for wilder trails. Her wooden keychain knocks quietly against the rucksack strap she’s fastened it to as they clamber over a desiccated log and return to the path.

“He was fun,” Dani answers, “but irresponsible. He could be cold, too, sometimes. He wasn’t a very happy person, but he’d try to make me smile.”

The roar of the falls grows in audibility upon their approach. Jamie glimpses the white spray between balding pines. 

“My dad never taught me much of anything,” says Jamie. “Don’t think he particularly cared to know me, even when he was around. Occasionally he’d spend time with Denny when he wasn’t yelling at us. I remember one time — few months before my mum left — when he took Denny out to a field and taught him how to shoot a hunting rifle. Me, being the little shite I was, followed to watch in secret.”

“Yeah,” Dani says with a hint of incredulity, “that’s not dangerous at all.”

Jamie flashes her a smirk and shrugs. “I stayed back plenty and watched them fire at birds. They killed a jackdaw. Left it there lying in the grass. Wasn’t like it was of any value to them. After they turned back, I walked out to find it. They got him right through the chest. At the time I seethed with envy because I wanted to shoot things, too, like Denny was allowed to. Now all I think is: what a fucking waste.”

“I know this isn’t an easy question,” Dani prefaces, “but do you think you’re more like your mom or your dad? I think about that a lot. I can’t decide which I’d rather it be. Neither are exactly what I’d call ideal.”

“Same for me, more or less.”

“It’s a scary thought, huh? When people insist you eventually become your parents?”

The query settles in Jamie’s stomach like a lump of coal. Lately, her parents have been visiting her thoughts unusually often. Their faces, eroded to vague, ghastly flotsam of fallible memory, bob around the tumbling tides of her conscience, reminding Jamie of her origin and inherited dispositions. 

_I am not like you,_ she privately asserts. _And while resisting you, I will take care not to become you; shattered and derelict._

Still, they linger, whispering _doomed vessel_ as their aspects drift in and out of focus.

Cool mist dapples Jamie’s skin near the waterfall’s boulder-congested base. It saturates the air and fills her lungs as she and Dani peer up at the curtain of water, waving like irised fabric under delicate stirrings of wind. The sight is deceptively airy and ethereal. While Bridalveil professes a lacy stream, its waters turn bitter as they churn over battered rocks and threaten to displace rare hikers crawling toward the cliff’s raw flesh. 

Jamie wants to attempt an approach until Dani indicates a sign warning against such excursions, citing dangers of slipping on the force of spring-turgid snowmelt. So they hang back among the ranks of sensible visitors to enjoy the ambience at a safe distance. 

While heading back, Jamie spots a patch of marigolds and columbine through thinning trees. At Dani’s suggestion they detour, heading off the path into seclusion. An abundance of mountainous landmarks remain within view to guide them back should they lose their way.

They sit down before the sun-beaten patch, occurring in the shadow of pine gathering around the felled trunk of kin, and view the flowers nodding in the mellow breeze of late afternoon. 

Dani uses her rucksack as a pillow and rests her head atop it, gazing up at the tall trees encircling them. Meanwhile, Jamie lies on her stomach and props her chin on a hand, pondering tiny blossoms too sacred to touch. 

After a few minutes, Dani points skyward and says, “Look. Jamie, look.”

Jamie turns to follow her gesture to a location among the trees. 

“Do you see it?”

Initially, Jamie can’t isolate what Dani refers to. Her brow knits as she searches further. Then, she sees it: a truly massive opened pinecone dangling from the twisted arm of a branch. They’re not positioned beneath its overhang, fortunately, but rather a few metres outside a radius of possible impact. 

The pinecone belongs to a tree of gnarled, aged proportions. Its eldest boughs sag beneath their own weight. The lowest grazes the forest floor and curves up in self-correction toward the glade’s sunlit edge. 

“It’s _huge_ ,” Dani delightedly remarks, sitting upright before altogether standing for a better look. “Like a basketball.”

Jamie stands with her, dusting her clothes off and picking a stalk of grass caught on Dani’s shirt. “Proper widow-maker, that one,” she concurs. “These aren’t Coulters, but still. Wouldn’t want to be under that when it falls.”

They might have been satisfied with respectfully viewing it at a distance, had a notion not occurred to Jamie. 

“Want me to get it?”

Dani smiles and sighs a breath of laughter at the proposition, evidently thinking it a joke. Humour fades into concern upon realising Jamie’s intent. “What? _No_. It’s too high up.”

Several paces bring Jamie to the base of the tree. She sheds her rucksack, sets her boot upon a bough’s craggy bark, and tests its negligible give.

“Jamie,” Dani says in warning. “We’re not supposed to take anything.”

“We’re not taking anything,” replies Jamie, already reaching for the branch overhead. “Just... giving it a wee nudge.” She finds Dani’s sense of propriety genuinely sweet. With a grunt, Jamie hoists herself up and straddles her new perch. She flicks away a few locks of curled fringe from the outskirts of her vision while looking up, estimating the distance to her ascent’s next rung. Fearless, she wraps her hands around another branch, finds a secure foothold, and climbs. 

Unexpectedly, Jamie finds herself intoxicated by the thrill of her predicament. This specific breed of thrill is old, quickening her blood like larceny once did. And seeing Dani below, hands balled into tense fists as she spectates the display of bravery, fitness, and actual stupidity, only drives Jamie deeper into her fit of recklessness. 

_You like that?_ Jamie chastises herself. _Showing off for your girlfriend? Showing her how absolutely fucking mental you are, and how well you survive yourself?_

She does like it. Far too much. 

Another question imposes itself: _You compensating for something?_

Jamie decides not to answer that one. 

“Jamie!” Dani calls after her. “I swear Jamie, if you get hurt—” She covers her eyes.

The sturdy denim of her jeans protects her from the scaly pine bark as Jamie shimmies herself along the branch closest to the monstrous pinecone. Under her weight, the branch bows, and Jamie is glad Dani has blinded herself to the next few seconds, over which she reaches out and braces one foot against the trunk for balance. 

The pinecone — easily the size of her head, bristling irascibly — comes loose, but evades Jamie’s grasp.

“Shit!” she curses at the sight of the overgrown grenade plummeting into a parasitic bush entwined with the tree’s exposed roots. 

At the sudden crash of twigs and leaves, Dani jumps and gives a startled cry, unveiling her eyes in fear of the unthinkable. When she spots Jamie above, perfectly intact, Dani clutches her chest and breathes in relief. 

The descent is tricky, but Jamie manages without incident. Her ankles sting at the nonchalant final drop. Before she can recover the pinecone to measure its survival, Dani is upon her, firmly pressing fingertips into Jamie’s upper chest and demanding, “Don’t _ever_ do that again.”

Jamie starts to smile, still high from the thrill. The expression falters, but ultimately persists, when Dani walks her back until Jamie’s shoulders connect with the elder pine’s unforgiving trunk. 

“I mean it,” Dani emphasises. It feels like a threat. That, too, thrills Jamie in a way it ought not to. “Promise me.”

“Like, specifically that? Or, ill-advised stunts in general—?”

Dani’s fingernails bite into Jamie’s arms as she stares her down. “All of it,” answers Dani. “Promise me, Jamie. Or else.” But not even she can conceal the hint of a smile as tries to half-heartedly bully Jamie into renouncing her bad behaviour. To more effectively plead her case, Dani’s hand slides down to Jamie’s wrist and lifts her palm to her heart, where close attention reveals its still-fearful beat. 

Pleasantly, Jamie concedes, “I promise.” 

Before Dani releases her, she grips Jamie’s shirt and sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, issuing a final threat that doesn’t feel like one at all. For five tremulous seconds, Jamie forgets how to breathe. 

In a daze of winded lust, Jamie saunters over to the bush to fish out the pinecone. While lightly damaged, its abominable glory remains unscathed. They marvel at its size and spiders spinning their webs in the grooves between scales. Jamie snaps a photo of Dani holding it. Respectfully, they set it down in a spot where it might have fallen from natural causes, and depart. 

While pausing along the paved trail to drink water, Jamie opens her notebook in the shadow of her rucksack and scribbles an impulsive addendum into the day’s entry:

Take me out of the garden, and I go wild. I go fucking insane. Which way is the wind blowing?

I think I’m dying. I think I’m in love.


End file.
